Introduction
In the introduction, we mentioned that in the practice of Ant's internal AI products, many experience confusions often arise, the most critical of which focus on the "fuzzy early stage" of design, such as: When should the conversational method be used? How to make AI understand the user’s intention? etc. Intention, an element of experience, has become even more important in the AI era. In addition to technical efforts, what can design do in terms of intention?
What is intention design
In the field of artificial intelligence, intent is usually defined as the goal that the user hopes to achieve, such as checking weather conditions, handling banking services, making an appointment for services, etc. These intentions are not always expressed directly, but are implicit in the words and actions of users.
In different fields and dimensions, intentions are also classified differently. For example, according to the clarity of user intention, it can be divided into clear intention and vague intention; according to the purpose of interaction between the user and the system, it can be divided into consulting information type and execution task type.
Why intention design
User intentions are often implicit in words and deeds, and people tend to express their needs in a natural way rather than directly stating their intentions. Therefore, it is crucial to accurately identify these implicit intentions. It can help AI respond to user needs more accurately and complete user goals more efficiently.
In other words, the realization of user goals has changed from cumbersome interface operations in the GUI era to AI’s understanding of complex intentions in the AGI era. This greatly reduces users’ learning costs and improves product experience. However, we found in Ant’s internal AI practice that not all intentions are suitable for conversational interaction. Sometimes a simple click is more efficient than multiple rounds of dialogue in some scenarios.
In addition to the problems of traditional interface interaction and conversational interface paradigms, through research we also found that most users have cognitive blind spots regarding AI products, that is, they are not clear about what intentions AI can help me achieve, and they often lack the ability to accurately express intentions, which to a certain extent hinders the effective application of AI. Therefore, how to improve users' awareness of AI capabilities and design an interface that allows users to express their intentions easily and accurately has become an important issue to be solved in the current field of AI design.
How to apply intention design
So how to apply intention design strategy to solve the experience design problems of AI products? An overview is shown below, please see the sub-chapters for specific details.
Original React text: Introduction.